As it so happened, there was a little life left in the old place, enough for a new piece to be accepted.

The story’s name is “Vulgar,” a title that does have a couple of meanings, including the obvious, so if there’s a language filter you need to deal with (either on your machine or personal) you’ve been warned.

Sometimes you can go back to where everyone knows your name. Or do they…?

One of the first things you learn if you want to be a pirate, is how to steal a ship. You need to eye what’s available, check out her lines, figure what kind of control you can expect from her, keeping in mind the targets you’ll be going for, and then come up with a cunning audacious plan to seize her and take her to sea.

Just a word of warning, though: There’s no obvious mention in these of any other vessels accompanying them, which is understandable for this year’s Fleet Week to honor such guests, but they do mention in passing that the USS Wasp will be in port over the weekend, and in a toe-to-toe fight even the best pirates might be hard pressed against a carrier with a compliment of Marines…

No, the Chinese are no closer to throwing their weight around the Gulf of Oman than they were back in October of 2009, yet it is interesting how much more committed IRIN is to showing the flag after the embarassment of having the “Great Satan” keep their waters open for them. (While in the process of demonstating that at any time thay they could close those waters as well, but that’s details…) Which just goes to show, that when you go pirate and sail against all flags, some of those you’re up against that you’d never expect to band together just might…

***

Mind you, you say “pirates” to anyone outside of the shipping industry, or to people who think Jane’s Defense Weekly is part of a series that has “Dick and…” in the title of all volumes, they tend to think of characters from the Golden Age of Piracy, the rough folk from the early 18th Century we remember better from J. M. Barrie’s work.

The obvious element they go for is the whole pirate attitude, the bucking the system mystique that define pirates and keep them popular today. See, the point of their campaign is to offer themselves as a viable alternative to the “big banks,” the commercial institutions that frankly could easily make the Dutch East India Company of that day seem like a forlorn subsidiary in an asset-to-asset comparison. And considering the rise of piracy in that period was in large part in defiance of the Mercantilist System, where capital was restricted to limited avenues where the house would always win by taking a cut at every turn…

Yeah, that’s kind of a mixed metaphor, roll with me here a sec…

…because piracy was in part about taking money out of the preferred avenues of circulation and keeping some of it aside, what better spokesfolks can you use for a credit union than pirates? And how many other businesses can you think of where pirates are just so right for your ad campaign?

My only real question is, why they went with actors when the folks of Long Island’s own Ye Pyrate Brotherhood could probably have crewed the spot. Then again, bankers being who they are, they probably wanted someone who wasn’t going to misread their letter of marque, ifyouknowwhatImean…

***

Anyways, if you think even these folks are too serious for you, there’s always the crew you can play in the game Pirates of the Stupid Seas. For a flash game consisting of ballistic puzzles with a pirate theme, it’s not half bad, and the special features you can unlock when you get full sets of treasure are interesting. No, Sid Meiyer has nothing to worry about from them, but it makes for a pretty decent time waster.